Ed­u­ca­tion can de­stroy big gov­ern­ment

Reader Jack Ryan makes an in­ter­est­ing point in his July 23rd edi­tion let­ter, wherein he states that we should place all state and fed­eral laws up for ref­er­en­dum af­ter al­low­ing them to “ex­pire.” The real point Mr. Ryan makes is not for a Bloomberg pres­i­dency, but for more em­pha­sis on civics in the class­room. We don’t have — and prob­a­bly don’t de­sire — a true democ­racy in the United States and will never have one un­less the cur­rent Con­sti­tu­tion is voided and re­placed. We have a rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­racy as set up by the found­ing fa­thers with a di­vi­sion of pow­ers be­tween the Congress (House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and Se­nate), Leg­is­la­ture and Ju­di­ciary (which of­ten­times op­er­ates as a sec­ondary Leg­isla­tive Branch, much to our dis­may and detri­ment). We also have an Elec­toral Col­lege to rep­re­sent the com­mon vote and pre­vent well-funded vested in­ter­ests from snow­ing the pop­u­lace. Cer­tainly it is clear that what lit­tle gets done in Wash­ing­ton would com­pletely grind to a halt if the cit­i­zens had to put ev­ery­thing up for ref­er­en­dum?

I’m not en­tirely clear whether Mr. Ryan wrote this tongue-in-cheek, but if not, re­me­dial civics might be a bet­ter goal than wast­ing ef­forts to have Michael Bloomberg be­come elected as leader of the free world. Dr. David Secord Cor­pus Christi, Texas